Community activists in Houston are demanding a review of police use of tasers. Why? The numbers.

Nearly two-thirds of those shocked with the high-voltage weapons over the last two years were black.

By the numbers:

• 23% of Houston's residents are African-American
• 50% of arrestees are African-American
• 620 of the 982 suspects tasered since 2004 were African American

More taser stats here.

LEAP, a group of former law enforcement officers opposed to the war on drugs, visits Great Britain this week. Simon Jenkins, writing for the Sunday Timesonline (UK) argues against prohibition and for licensing. He outlines the failure of the war on drugs.

Most drug users can handle the harm it undoubtedly does them personally. To this extent there is no justification for the state interfering in a private activity. As with the control of alcohol, the regulation of outlets should be required only to protect minors, prevent adulteration and collect taxes. Other European countries are moving in this direction, at least with ecstasy, cannabis and heroin.

Is New York City now the safest city in the country?

It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time.

The national trend of lock em' up continues to be disturbing.

In Northeast Atlanta, near Georgia Tech, police made a drug buy from a house and came back with a search warrant, raiding the house. They shot dead a 92 year old woman who had a gun defending her house. The Atlanta police involved seemed, to me, particularly cavalier about the entire matter. "'This seems like another tragedy involving drugs,' [ADA] Howard said."  

How much of this is attributable to flawed Supreme Court policy statements?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this story today: Questions surround fatal shooting of woman, 92:

It's about time. Finally, a judge has stepped in to the mess that has become the criminal justice system in New Orleans and ordered that more public defenders be hired.

The order, issued Monday by judges in the Criminal District Court, said mismanagement of the Orleans Parish Indigent Defender Program has denied poor defendants their 6th Amendment right to proper legal representation. "Day to day, defendants are in jail that just aren't getting the representation that they should be getting," Chief Judge Raymond Bigelow said.

Under the order, the public defender's office must hire 12 public defenders one for every courtroom by Dec. 1, which will double the number of public defenders in each section of criminal court. Currently, there is one attorney in each of the 12 sections.

Statistics show that 90% of New Orleans defendants rely on public defenders.

Here's more, more and more on the city's problems since Katrina. Although, getting justice in Louisiana was no picnic before Katrina either.

In an editorial today, the Houston Chronicle praises a tough sentencing judge's call to reduce drug possession sentences.

Recently, state Judge Michael Mc-Spadden called on the governor and Legislature to reduce sentences for low-level drug possession. In a letter to Gov. Rick Perry, the judge, a former prosecutor with more than 20 years' judicial experience, wrote, "These minor offenses are now overwhelming every felony docket, and the courts necessarily spend less time on the more important, violent crimes."

The result has been that small-time offenders, some accused only of possessing residual amounts of cocaine in a crack pipe, are clogging local jails. In fact, there were almost two times as many Harris County defendants sent to state jails last year for possessing less than 1 gram of a drug — less than the contents of a sugar packet — than in all of the major urban counties of Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar combined. Possession of less than 1 gram of a drug is a felony that often lands people in state jail for six months to two years.

Unbelievable.

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

The student hadn't shown his ID.. LA Times article is here.

Jessalyn McCurdy of the ACLU testified at today's U.S. Sentencing Commission hearing on the crack-powder cocaine penalties:

A recent ACLU report, Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of the Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law, supported the USSC's recommendation that Congress reconsider the 100-to-1 disparity. The report....recommends that federal prosecutions focus on high-level traffickers of both crack and powder cocaine, and supports the elimination of mandatory minimums for crack and powder offenses, especially the mandatory minimum for simple possession.

In her testimony, McCurdy emphasized the report's core finding, that there is no scientific or penological justification for the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity ratio. Although Congress' stated intent was to target high-level cocaine traffickers, the result has been just the opposite - in 2002, a USSC report found that only 15 percent of federal cocaine traffickers can be classified as high-level, while over 70 percent of crack defendants have low-level involvement in drug activity, such as street level dealers, couriers, or lookouts.

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, who presides over the Scooter Libby case, testified today at the U.S. Sentencing Commission hearing on crack-powder cocaine penalties.

Judge Walton was a deputy drug czar and top drug policy advisor to President G.H. Bush.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton told the U.S. Sentencing Commission that federal laws requiring dramatically longer sentences for crack cocaine than for cocaine powder were "unconscionable" and contributed to the perception within minority communities that courts are unfair.

"I never thought that the disparity should be as severe as it has become," said Walton, who sits on the bench in Washington, where he previously served as a Superior Court judge, a federal prosecutor and a deputy drug czar.

If you are in the New York area at the end of the month, NYC's New School is holding an impressive conference on the nature of punishment in modern America.

Join us as we examine the foundations of our ideas of punishment, explore the social effects of current practices and search for viable alternatives to our carceral state.

The conference meets between 11/30-12/1/2006 in Manhattan. It lists impresssive number of top notch criminal justice experts, including death penalty expert Stephen Bright from the Southern Center on Human Rights and U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner (Boston), true champions of liberty. The cost for this two day conference is pegged at an affordable $50 (a single session is only $12). Law students, are you listening?

Grits for Breakfast has the scoop on the memo that went out to federal judges asking them to consider sealing the records of those who cooperated with the government to get leniency in their own cases. The full memo is here (pdf).

What's behind the request? Their fear the snitches will turn up on the internet site Who's a Rat.

Among the items perceived as appropriate for sealing: Plea agreements of the cooperators. The Judicial Conference says they look forward to working closely with the Department of Justice in this matter.

What is the most unfair, draconian law passed during the Reagan Administration that is still law today? The one that makes the the penalties for crack cocaine offenses 100 times more severe than those for powder cocaine.

Eric Sterling has an op-ed in the LA Times today on the topic. Tomorrow, the U.S. Sentencing Commission will hold hearings on the disparate penalties.

ONE OF OUR MOST infamous contemporary laws is the 100-1 difference in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Under federal drug laws, prison sentences are usually tied to the quantity of drugs the defendant trafficked. For example, selling 5,000 grams of powder cocaine (about a briefcase full) gets a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, but so does selling only 50 grams of crack cocaine (the weight of a candy bar).

Working for the House Judiciary Committee in 1986, I wrote the House bill that was the basis for that law. We made some terrible mistakes.

Sterling observes: